"It wasn’t just that the pace of juggling achievement seemed to be accelerating. The patterns of the objects themselves were also changing. In the ’80s, a few j

"It wasn’t just that the pace of juggling achievement seemed to be accelerating. The patterns of the objects themselves were also changing. In the ’80s, a few jugglers with academic backgrounds had developed something called “siteswap” — a mathematical notation for objects in motion. Siteswap is to juggling what a musical score is to a piano player. A juggler conversant in siteswap can look at a string of numbers — say, 7 5 3 1 — and know that the numbers are telling him to juggle four objects so that their arcs peak at four different heights. (The numbers refer to relative altitude.) Gatto never took to siteswap, but others did; the notation helped them imagine and execute wild new patterns, and through the ’90s and 2000s the aesthetic of high-end technical juggling started to change. You can see it in the work of a modern juggler like Thomas Dietz, a lanky German who uses a lot of siteswap patterns. Watching Dietz is like walking through a gallery of Sol LeWitt paintings; you know that the patterns come from math, but you also know a human is painting them." (from https://grantland.com/features/anthony-gatto-juggling-cirque-du-soleil-jason-fagone/ https://grantland.com/features/anthony-gatto-juggling-cirque..., which is the best read you're likely to find on juggling and juggling culture)